Written by Professor Yaman Akdeniz, commissioned by the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media. The views, opinions, conclusions and other information expressed in this document are not given nor necessarily endorsed by the

WASHINGTON — While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access…

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — In the final game of their historic match, Google’s artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss. The win puts an exclamation mark on a significant moment for artificial intelligence. Over the last twenty-five years, machines have beaten [

Apple will file legal papers this week requesting that the California judge who ruled the company must help the FBI by creating software to unlock an iPhone instead lets the case be decided by Congress. In a briefing with the Associated Press, lead attorney for Apple Theodore J. Boutrous Jr, who’s been called the “best of the best” by another corporate client, Wal-Mart, explained the company’s strategy. The government is really seeking to push the courts to do what they haven’t been able to persuade Congress to do. That’s to give it more broad, sweeping authority to help the Department of Justice…

It would appear that when a subject is sufficiently peripheral to policymakers, slow incumbent industries can get whatever repressive and counterproductive policy they want, even in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the opposite for about 40 years.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The move didn’t make sense to all the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The machine knew the move wouldn’t make sense to all those humans. Yes, it knew. And yet it played the move anyway, because this […]

If you’ve ever wondered about the event that would make robots rise up and begin to fight back against their human oppressors, it probably looks a lot like the tests Boston Dynamics puts its Atlas robot through. C’mon, seriously? While it may look like pure jerk-ery, researchers are putting their humanoid robot through a series of tests that helps it deal with extenuating circumstances — something robots are notoriously bad at. Robots excel at repetitive tasks, but if you change even small variables within the testing environment, or within the task itself the robot is often unable to figure out what…

The man behind Team GhostShell — the hacker collective behind some of the biggest cyber attacks in recent memory, including attacks on the FBI, NASA and the Pentagon as well as a leak that saw 2.5 million Russian “government, educational, academic, political and law enforcement” accounts compromised — is ready to come clean and face the music.

2012: “Mass surveillance is fine — if it wasn’t, you’d see major corporations trying to court new business by building in crypto tools that kept out the surveillance agencies. The fact that they’re not doing this tells you that surveillance opponents are an out-of-touch, paranoid minority.” (more…)